The Project Gutenberg EBook of Poems, by Wilfred Owen

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Title: Poems

Author: Wilfred Owen

Posting Date: August 10, 2008 [EBook #1034]
Release Date: September, 1997

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS ***

Produced by Alan R. Light, and Gary M. Johnson

POEMS

by Wilfred Owen

With an Introduction by Siegfried Sassoon

[Note on text: Italicized words or phrases are capitalized.
Lines longer than 78 characters are broken and the continuation
is indented two spaces.]

Introduction

In writing an Introduction such as this it is good to be brief. The
poems printed in this book need no preliminary commendations from me or
anyone else. The author has left us his own fragmentary but impressive
Foreword; this, and his Poems, can speak for him, backed by the
authority of his experience as an infantry soldier, and sustained by
nobility and originality of style. All that was strongest in Wilfred
Owen survives in his poems; any superficial impressions of his
personality, any records of his conversation, behaviour, or appearance,
would be irrelevant and unseemly. The curiosity which demands such
morsels would be incapable of appreciating the richness of his work.

The discussion of his experiments in assonance and dissonance (of which
'Strange Meeting' is the finest example) may be left to the professional
critics of verse, the majority of whom will be more preoccupied with
such technical details than with the profound humanity of the self-
revelation manifested in such magnificent lines as those at the end of
his 'Apologia pro Poemate Meo', and in that other poem which he named
'Greater Love'.

The importance of his contribution to the literature of the War cannot
be decided by those who, like myself, both admired him as a poet and
valued him as a friend. His conclusions about War are so entirely in
accordance with my own that I cannot attempt to judge his work with any
critical detachment. I can only affirm that he was a man of absolute
integrity of mind. He never wrote his poems (as so many war-poets did)
to make the effect of a personal gesture. He pitied othe